Rethinking the Cultural Icon: Its Use and Function in Popular Culture
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Rethinking the Cultural Icon: Its Use and Function in Popular Culture Emily Truman University of Calgary ABSTRACT Background The role of cultural icons in twenty-first century North American popular cul - ture has been under-theorized in communication scholarship. This is a significant gap in knowledge, given the importance of the icon as a public text through which collective cultural values are symbolized. Analysis Using the novel approach of the scoping review, this article illuminates the current landscape of iconic studies by identifying wide-ranging examples of the cultural icon from academic scholarship, recognizing organizational categories, and synthesizing existing defi - nitions to highlight the limits of current conceptualizations. Conclusions and Implications Informed by the collected data, this article suggests a rede - finition of the cultural icon that considers its current novel role in revealing tensions between different articulations of collective cultural values. Keywords Cultural icon; Symbolism; Collective values; Publics; Visual communication RÉSUMÉ Contexte Le rôle des icônes culturels dans la culture populaire nord-américaine de ce siècle n’a pas encore reçu une attention théorique soutenue en communication. Cette lacune est sérieuse, vu l’importance de l’icône en tant que texte public par lequel nous représentons nos valeurs culturelles collectives. Analyse Au moyen de l’approche novatrice qu’est l’examen de la portée, cet article illumine le terrain contemporain des études iconiques en identifiant divers exemples de l’icône culturel dans la recherche académique, en recensant des catégories organisationnelles pour celui-ci, et en faisant la synthèse de définitions courantes afin de souligner les limites des conceptualisations actuelles. Conclusion et implications Cet article s’inspire des données recueillies pour proposer une redéfinition de l’icône culturel qui rend compte de son rôle novateur de souligner les tensions sous-tendant diverses articulations de valeurs culturelles collectives. Mots clés Icône culturel; Symbolisme; Valeurs collectives; Publics; Communication visuelle Emily Truman , PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Communication at the University of Calgary. Email: [email protected] . Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 42 (20 17) 829 -849 ©20 17 Canadian Journal of Communication Corporation http://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2017v42n5a3223 830 Canadian Journal of Communication , Vol 42 (5) Introduction What constitutes a “cultural icon” in twenty-first century North American popular cul - ture? All of the following have been attributed this status in academic literature: Shakespeare, Oprah, Batman, Anne of Green Gables, the Cowboy, the 1960s female pop singer, the horse, Las Vegas, the library, the Barbie doll, DNA, and the New York Yankees. These popular cultural icons share characteristics in common with all icons: the ability to function as repositories of collective cultural values, a ubiquitous presence in popular culture, and roots in specific socio-historical contexts that contribute to their iconicity. They are subject to high levels of public scrutiny through elevated circulation in North American popular culture: appearing authoritative and controversial in different his - torical moments and in varied contexts. However, they are also a category of unique iconic communicative entities that exist in and through mass culture, mass media, broadcasting, popular audiences, and the digital networked culture of the internet. They belong to the cultural history of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Cultural icons in twenty-first century North American popular culture have a height - ened malleability, or adaptability, in part due to digital editing and distribution tech - nologies, evoking the idea of contemporary cultural icons as biological entities that are alive and changing. 1And yet, despite the wide use of the term “cultural icon” in popular discourse and academic literature, the concept is not treated as a unique version of iconic signification but more often as a subset of the icon, resulting in its poor definition and under-theorization, especially in the context of networked digital culture. This study aims to establish a formalized and concrete way of conceptualizing the role of the cultural icon in twenty-first century North American popular culture. It does this by engaging in a novel approach to surveying current literature on the cul - tural icon: the method of the scoping review—a popular approach in social and health science research used to assess the breadth of existing research on a given topic. By systematically collecting information about cultural icons from comprehensive aca - demic databases (including Communication & Mass Media Complete, JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, the Web of Science, and Google Scholar), this study pro - duces an inventory of iconic examples illuminating the existing landscape of study, including organizational categories and concept definitions. Further, by synthesizing the data, including how cultural icons are labelled and defined, the study isolates the existing language used to describe their function(s) highlighting the limits of current conceptualizations. Based on this data, a new definition of the cultural icon as it func - tions within current networked digital culture is suggested, addressing a theoretical gap in cultural theory with reference to the study of iconic symbolism in twenty-first century North American popular culture. Cultural icons are the product of specific his - torical contexts, thus they are able to point to the significance of the particular social, cultural, and political moments and modes in which they are embedded. This enables them to illuminate cultural anxieties, and highlight the tensions between different ver - sions of collective meaning. 2 The language of the icon: Describing iconic function Given the status of icons as visual shortcuts for complex ideas, their meanings tend to be assumed, rather than defined, by those who use them (Fishwick & Browne, 1970). Truman Use and Function of Cultural Icon in Popular Culture 831 This is problematic because understanding the meaning of an icon ( what it commu - nicates or expresses) is directly connected to the ability to isolate and explain its func - tion ( how it communicates specific cultural values) and to explore its purpose ( why it is chosen as a representative symbol of those values). These interrelated elements form a language of iconic signification that is used to explore its importance. In popular discourse, iconic language tends to be simplified, often applied as a de - scriptor (something is “iconic”) or in declarative statements (something/someone is “an icon”). A common example of this is its use as an adjective to label a famous figure, such as a celebrity idol or venerated historical person. However, the term is also fre - quently applied as a noun to describe objects associated with everyday practices in networked digital culture, as in the example of the computer desktop icon, which func - tions as a screen image linking to programs or files. Whether adjective or noun, “icons” and “iconic” are popular labels in journalistic writing as evidenced by the number of such references in Canadian news sources. Between 2011 and 2016 alone, 78,879 men - tions of the term “icon” or “iconic” appear in Canadian news sources. 3 That is the equivalent of 36 uses of the term per day. The etymology of the term “icon” reveals a long history of shifting conceptions that include the icon as sign, the icon as sacred religious image/object, and the icon as representative cultural symbol. Annotations in the Oxford English Dictionary on the term “icon” place the emergence of these interrelated definitions in the sixteenth, nine - teenth, and mid-twentieth centuries respectively (OED Online, 2016). These approaches are represented in academic literature, especially in the areas of semiotics, art history, and visual culture, in which the icon has been a key subject of study. Charles Sanders Peirce developed a foundational semiotic model of signs and their functions, arguing that an icon is a simple sign, “which stands for its object … Most icons, if not all, are likenesses of their objects” (Houser & Kloesel, 1992, p. 13, emphasis in original). As ex - amples, Peirce offered the object of the photograph, the diagram, and geometric figures. This approach offers a language of the icon as “sign” representing a given object. The second approach describes the function of the icon as religious symbol, in - troducing the language of the sacred. As Martin Kemp (2012) notes, the term “icon” has been “associated specifically with the hieratic and largely invariant paintings pro - duced over the centuries in Eastern Churches and favoured by Orthodox Christianity to this day” (p. 17). Here, the core function of the icon is to represent a sacred symbol and present it for worship. This description of the icon as sacred religious object is di - rectly connected to the centrality of the Christian Church in medieval European life (Alexander, Bartmanski, & Giesen, 2012; Nachbar & Lause, 1992). And finally, the third approach describes the function of the icon as representative of a cultural symbol. Differentiating the contemporary context from the “traditional” view of the icon as sacred object above, visual culture scholars Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2009) argue that icons are images or people that symbolize broader no - tions, including “universal concepts, emotions, and meanings”